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Abandoned Patents
When an inventor finishes the long and arduous patent application process and is finally granted a patent, he or she seldom thinks about abandoning it. That happens all too often. Sometimes before the patent is even granted.
Patents are costly to get and also costly to maintain. The US patent office charges steadily increasing fees to keep a patent in force. If that patent is in use and protecting valuable products from copycats, those charges are seldom an issue. However, often patents are not commercialized either by the inventor or by some subsequent licensee. In that case the continuous regular fees become a burden that cannot be easily justified as a worthwhile expense.
Often in such cases the inventor will stop paying the fees and the patent office will list the patent as "abandoned" essentially putting the technology that it protected into the public domain for use by anyone.
At that point the invention becomes an opportunity for anyone with the facilities to develop it commercially because the patent that protected it is no longer in force.
Large companies with extensive and expensive patent portfolios will often resort to abandonment as a strategy to keep their costs down. This opens the door to smaller companies who might want to market products in the same area as the "big boys" but were blocked by their patent thickets.
The large companies will also try other strategies such as bundling the patents into portfolios which then are sent to patent brokers for licensing.
Another strategy that a small company can employ is to "improve" an abandoned patent. While the abandoned patent is in the public domain and available to anyone, the "improvement" can be patented by the small company. This is a great strategy for the small company to build its own patent thicket.
A small company can essentially secure the rights to a large portfolio of technology by making small improvements to key abandoned patents. This strategy is also a tactic of patent trolls, who have no intention of commercializing a technology, but simply want to sue someone who is using patents they own.
BML can help you find abandoned patents in your business space and suggest potential improvements to them you can make.
To contact us, just send an email to rblazey@businessmetamorphosis.com or give us a call at (585) 520-3539
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